When an imploring librarian is not enough

So last month I had a doozy of a library research class.  It was a 3 hour class about "library research" to about 100 second year undergraduate students and it wasn't tied to a particular assignment, a particular course, or even a particular discipline. Furthermore, the primary instructors for this particular program promptly exited the room as soon as the majority of students had signed in. Not exactly win conditions.

But I survived and the students survived. Some parts of the class went better than expected. Other parts I wished I could do over. And the class both reinforced and challenged my ideas about research, habits and tool use. Here's what happened.

This particular class was held in a large lecture hall and students were instructed to bring their laptops with them. Those without laptops were to share with those around them. I didn't pay that close attention to the few students that came without laptops but I strongly suspect that they, at best, only watched their seatmates work through the class exercises. Laptops are simply too personal to hand over to strangers. Unless its made explicit that students must have laptops for classwork then I think the school does bare some responsibility of having laptops to lend out on a short term use. But the matter of equity of access aside, I much prefer that students use their laptops rather than placing them all into a computer lab. What better way to simulate a research experience than using the actual research tool that the student uses everyday?

After I introduced myself and our co-op student (who kindly joined me to help out with questions from the students) I briefly told the students what I hoped to cover in the class and then started off with a quick five minute activity. I asked them to find a paper written by a University of Windsor professor and to raise their hand when they did. As they raised their hands, I would walk over the student, look at their screens and ask how they found the paper.

Most of the students answered "Google". A considerable number of students used the search box on the University of Windsor web site and searched the word, "paper" or a variation of that word. Only one student that I visited in that five minutes used a library indexing tool to find a paper.

After the five minutes was up, I gave brief synopsis of what I had seen and I make no explicit value judgment of which way was the "right way" to find a research paper. I wanted to send a strong signal that I was more interested in how they really did their research rather than set them up for praise them if they used library resources. I simply reported back that most people used Google and the Google-powered search engine on the University of Windsor website to find a paper.

I then asked the room this question: "How is doing scholarly research different from your everyday searching with Google?"

I think this is an important question. We know that students "search" multiple times a day in their everyday life and in most cases, they are largely successful and confident in their searching abilities. Unless we clearly ask students to confront the possibility that things could be done differently, they won't even consider changing their practice.

Now in this particular class, I had a problem. The first person gave a thorough and correct answer: "scholarly research involves using peer reviewed sources that has most likely been published." There's nothing like a correct answer to nip discussion in the bud. I've had similar discussions in classes that have meandered in all sorts of great territory, like the non-commercial nature of scholarly communication, the use of the scientific method and statistical analysis, what indicates expertise in a field, the acknowledgment of bias... but in this class, I wasn't able to catch a spark and I caught myself doing most of the talking. Luckily, I had prepared an escape route.

I asked the class, can you trust everything found by the library?

After a muted response of  "most times" and "meh", I explained that they absolutely shouldn't everything trust that they find in the library because I, as a librarian, had added to the collection such titles as Yes To Human Cloning!

That book is by the Raelian cult and they are my new favourite research example because they touch all sorts of disciplinary ground: science, UFSs, religion, media manipulation, sexuality, and Canadian Content, to boot. And, even better, the kids these days know nothing about these weirdos.

So I let the class know that this was a book from a cult called the Raelians and pointed out that the book is just two books down the shelf from one of the most important "real" books about cloning). I told them that the library had books about intelligent design and books about evolution. And while on this theme of healthy skepticism, we went to Wikipedia to learn more about the Raelians. We looked at the History tab on the page to see the level of discussion this topic was generating and to see if there was any tell-tale signs of Raelian influence on the page. I then asked the students to find newspaper articles to confirm the information found in the page.

And even though I navigated on my own screen to the library's newspaper page and suggested that they try to use these sources for this mini-assignment, the majority of students still defaulted to using Google and Google News where they found some newspaper articles and reprints of newspaper articles in blog posts. This has happened to me before. I once led a class about scholarly visual arts resources and even after immediately showing what fine tools we had, the majority of the class used  dictionary.com for their research assignment. It throws me off every time. Their online habits are too strong to be broken by the imploring of a librarian to change.

And yet I persist because I'm not sure what else to do. I then used the same method to introduce tools to find journal articles on the topic: ask them to use the tool they would normally use for an in-class assignment, show them the advantages to using Google Scholar instead of Google, and then show them the advantages of using library-paid scholarly tools instead of Google.  At the end of this part of the class, I'm quite sure I have converted many of the students to using Google Scholar instead of Google but I don't have same confidence that I have made a convincing case for what we provide from the library.

But later in the class, I accidentally stumbled on a way where I actually had students ask me if there was something better than Google Scholar was available. 

In the second hour of the class, I introduced RefWorks and Zotero to the students and gave them a mini-assignment to create a bibliography that they would then have to share with someone else. I didn't teach them how to use the tools - I just pointed to the screencasts that both citation management products provide and wandered around to help out the students who were stuck. And I would like to note that the students *loved* these tools. At first, at least...

And that's when it happened. Students starting importing articles from Google Scholar into their bibliographies and noticed that many authors and other key bits of information were missing. I told these students that at this point they had a choice: they could either correct the citations manually, or they could use a library-provided tool like Web of Science that would do a better job of the citation information.  And it was only then that I saw real and genuine interest in using library subscription products for their research needs. For better metadata, no less.

I'm still working through ideas about how tool choice and habit influence how students learn, both within and out of higher education.

And you are reading this because my own habit is to write out my thoughts in a post as I work out difficult ideas. I implore you to do the same.

The other gaming platform war - LibraryThing, Wikipedia and The Zotero Commons

I’ve been investigating the spaces between and the spaces that overlap games and libraries as of late and while I have been doing so, I’ve been stumbling upon various forms of ‘library games’ and – of greater interest to myself – “research games”.  One such “research game” that has caught my attention is The Wikipedia Game.

During a lull in class, me and some classmates figured out a way to combine our favorite things: wasting time and Wikipedia. We invented a game where you try to find a certain item (for example, pancakes) the fastest, measured in either time or clicks. Here are the rules:

• You cannot edit any pages
• You must start from the home page (http://wikipedia.org/)
• You cannot type anything. Everything must be done via mouse clicks.
• You cannot use the categories, A-Z listings, etc

Here's a sample game, searching for "witchcraft."

Wikipedia > English Wikipedia > United States > Massachusetts > Salem > Salem Witch Trials > Witchcraft

I'm not sure whether the example above is the first incarnation of the game but it is not the last iteration. There is also The Wiki Game in which the word goals are auto-generated and there is a ticking clock that you compete against.  It appears that the same game has been ported into a $2 iPhone app.

Now I have to admit that I have entertained the thought of trying a similar game but using the an online public library catalogue (an OPAC to those in the profession) instead of Wikipedia, but it didn't take much visualization at all to come to the conclusion that such a  game would be difficult and not fun for most people.

The main reason why is that Wikipedia is an idea-space where there are multiple means of making connections between disparate concepts ("Your start page is: Sulfuric acid. You are looking for: Reality in Buddhism. Go!") Library catalogues can only make connections between authors and  Library of Congress Subject Headings which are few and not intuitive. And while making connections between actors is a bona fide fun thing to do, most books are written by a single author and so any connections are few and tenuous at best.

Of note, LibraryThing - which is very rich in its connections between authors, descriptions, and users - already is the platform of at least two games: CoverGuess and Another silly game part 67,

I feel a maxim coming on. Let's try this one:

Until your platform can support a game, it cannot be called social software.

Hmm. I'm not crazy about the maxim myself but rather than refine it, I want to continue this speculation of what an alternative idea-space game-platform could look like. Because I've been thinking about it for a while now. And would you believe that I think one of the best candidates is... footnotes?

Citations are what connect the ideas within various works together.  They make up the web in The Web of Science. They allow Google Scholars to Stand on the shoulders of giants.  And yet inexplicably, online footnotes are vanishing.

The beta version of Zotero 2.1 (available for download here) provides users of the Zotero citation management web service, an easier means of uploading primary documents into the Internet Archive using Zotero Commons. Perhaps future Zotero developments will make stronger and more plentiful connections between ideas and works. There's already one Zotero game out there but I would rather play The Wikipedia Game for now.

Using Wikipedia for Collection Development

Most students start their research work with a visit to Wikipedia.

Knowing this, doesn't it make sense that your library have copies of the works mentioned in the Wikipedia's lists of references and their further readings sections of the subjects that you know they are writing assignments about?

Because Ideas Matter - Finding Special Collections on the web

Some years ago MPOW made the painful but necessary decision to remove the bibliographies that were are all grouped together in the Reference Collection and to re-catalogue each one so that each bibliography could be found with the subject it was about. This meant that bibliographies on Shakespeare could be found with the other Shakespeare books which would make it more likely to be stumbled upon and more likely to save the user a trip to another set of stacks in the library.

I bring this up because this project came to mind when I was doing some follow up research on a book by and about Jane Jacobs. The book contains material from the Jane Jacobs Papers that are located, not in New York City or Toronto as one would first presume, but in Boston College. Now those papers are from her life from 1916 to 1995. Jane Jacobs passed away in 2006. Where are the papers from her last decade? That's not a rhetorical question - I haven't found out where they are yet.

If the future of academic libraries means currating our unique collections, we have to start doing a better job of letting the world know what we have to offer. This means recognizing that most people search for a subject - not for a bibliography or a directory of library special collections. But how can we achieve that? How can we nestle information about the unique and rich collections in our libraries right beside the subjects that they are about in the online world?

There is a way. Thank you Wikipedia.

Now you go to it! Add your library's collections to The Free Encyclopedia right now!

36 percent of online American adults consult Wikipedia

From the most recent Pew Report:

Top 20 Educational and Reference Websites
Week Ending March 17, 2007
Share of traffic in the category that week

1. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) 24.33%
2. Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/) 4.23%
3. Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/) 3.79%
4. Answers.com (http://www.answers.com/) 3.53%
5. SparkNotes (http://www.sparknotes.com/) 1.62%
6. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) 1.31%
7. Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/) 1.09%
8. Find Articles (http://www.findarticles.com/) .99%
9. U.S. National Library of Medicine (http://www.findarticles.com/) .99%
10. Merriam-Webster Online (http://www.m-w.com/) .85%

Source: Hitwise, U.S. Internet Visits (market share) for week ending March 17, 2007


I admit I had never heard of SparkNotes until now. [ttw]

13 Ways of Looking at Wikipedia, Encyclopedias and Libraries

There! I did it. I managed to untangle my confused thoughts and feelings on Wikipedia, libraries and encyclopedias into digestible parts.

13 Ways of Looking at Wikipedia, Encyclopedias and Libraries:

1. A standing army is waiting for orders
2. Wikipedia is to Britannica as American Idol is to the Juilliard School
3. The Song of the Darnedest Stuff
4. Because Britannica Doesn't Recognize You
5. Do mere mortals buy encyclopedias?
6. Are there encyclopedias that scholars use?
7. Encyclopedias down the rabbit hole
8. The closest reference book on the digital shelf
9. There is no point not having a point of view
10. Many hands make crappy work
11. One search box to unite them all
12. Wikipedia is War
    
13. Why do we keep buying print encyclopedias?
    

No more for a while. I promise.

Wikipedia is War

Its not enough to make a contribution to Wikipedia on a topic that you care about. If you really care about your subject you are going to have watch over your pages, ever-vigilant.

I realized this after reading a short but amusing interview with Bearcat - an individual who has dedicated considerable time adding and editing Wikipedia entries about the CBC. My favourite part was this:

There was an American editor who first popped up during the CBC labour dispute last year. He didn't know very much about the CBC, but seemed to have heard on NPR that there was a labour dispute, and this somehow inspired him to make a complete muck of CBC articles on Wikipedia. First he *removed* the program schedules from the articles, and then asked us why the articles didn't provide detail on CBC's programming. Then he started writing articles himself on CBC programs that didn't have articles yet; naturally, given his lack of knowledge, they mostly consisted of vague equivocations like "Music and Company is a program on CBC Radio Two that probably plays classical music."

He also tried more than once to propagate the theory that Toronto'’s CFMX (Classical 96) should take over CBC Radio Two, which he did mainly by changing the call signs of CBC stations to make it appear as though his fantasy takeover had *already* happened...

Wikipedia, needless to say, can be a real education in human psychology at times.

Its a recurring theme to my readings on Wikipedia. You must have patience, persistence and...

You have to be able to suffer a lot of foolishness to work on Wikipedia. You really do. And for most people who were brought up in academic discourse, the way people behave just isn'’t acceptable. But you have to balance that against the efficiency of producing the largest encyclopedia in human history over the course of five years.

When the truth goes to whoever has the last edit, the editing will never end.

The closest reference book on the digital shelf

A couple years ago, I was in front of a class of first year, visual arts students in a computer lab in the library where I worked. I was reviewing their answers to the library assignment that the students had been working on for the last 20 minutes. I had worked on the assignment with their professor who was, at the time, sitting in the back of the class. I mention this fact for a reason. Even though the students were in a library, using library computers that displayed the library's website, and even though the students knew that they were there for a library assignment (and while being in the presence of their professor), almost the entire class answered the question "give a definition of pointillism" by using dictionary.com.

I have to admit that the first time this happened, I blanched a bit. But I did feel somewhat better when I realized that I was being treated with the privilege of their honesty. This was how they did research.

I then introduced some of the general and subject dictionaries that were online and offered by the library and as I did so the professor did a wonderful job explaining why the definitions in these dictionaries were of much better in quality and, by the way, had the sort of detail and quality that she was expecting from their upcoming paper. Her presence and her participation made all the difference in this class. The students got to hear an expert explain why they should use expert tools as they worked to become experts themselves.

Without instruction, students won't know the differences between Webster dictionaries and Merriam Webster dictionaries. Most of them won't know the difference between the Cambridge English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. There's not much brand consciousness in dictionaries and brand consciousness is everything in this modern world.

This is why to most folks there are really only three encyclopedias: Britannica, Wikipedia and Encarta.

Wait. Sorry. I forgot the highest ranked encyclopedia in Google: encyclopedia.com

Are there encyclopedias that scholars use?

Are there any encyclopedias that currently hold a important position in the understanding of a particular discipline of scholarship? The best way to answer that question would be to ask scholars directly about the matter. Another way to try to ascertain an answer is to see if scholars are citing encyclopedias in their published research.

Using ISI's Web of Science "Cited Reference Search", I searched for the term encyclopedia* to find the papers that had an encyclopedia mentioned in their bibliographies.

There are three indexes within Web of Science. The index that is the smallest - that being, covers the fewest number of journals is the "Arts & Humanities Citation Index". The index covers 1149 journals and for the period of 1996 to 2006, there are only 48 papers encyclopedias entries that are that are cited in a bibliography. Most encyclopedias in this list are only cited once and there is no encyclopedia that is cited repeatedly.

The "Social Sciences Citation Index" covers 1917 journals and from 1996 to 2006, there are 123 works encyclopedias entries that have been cited in a bibliography. Most of the encyclopedia entries are only cited once but there are a handful of exceptions when an entry is cited a couple times. There was only one encyclopedia that was cited frequently (24 times) and that was Encyclopedia Britannica.

Not surprisingly, the Science Citation Index (Expanded) is the largest index within Web of Science. It covers 6543 journals and from 1996 to 2006, 114 papers encyclopedia entries were cited in a bibliography. Unlike the other two indexes, there are encyclopedias whose entries are cited quite heavily. By far, the most heavily cited encyclopedia was "The Encyclopedia of Plant Physiology" with many entries cited over 50 times. The next encyclopedic work with similar impact is "The Encyclopedia of Polymer Science and Engineering".

Now one could make the argument that I have set up this test for encyclopedias to fail from the start as encyclopedias aren't meant to communicate important ideas among scholars. You could say that encyclopedias exist to provide an important reference to students and are meant for their use.

Incidentally, from the years 1996 to 2006, there have been 12 papers in Web of Science that cite Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is to Britannica as American Idol is to the Juilliard School

The latest issue of the New Yorker has a taken a little snapshot of Wikipedia (link will expire eventually) and wonders whether Wikipedia can sustain its battle against the experts. While Wikipedia is compared to Britannica several times in the article, no attention is given to the fact that Wikipedia is free and Britannica costs $11.95 a month ("Save $1,251.60 off the print Encyclopedia Britannica!"). Of course, many people have free online access to Britannica through their local library but they just don't know it.

From my understanding, public libraries are reluctant to advertise their online wares like Britannica for a couple reasons. First, they have limited marketing budgets. And secondly, even if the library could afford a city-wide campaign promoting their online databases, they choose not to because the access to such products are done on a per user basis. This means that while you are able to make three users happy at a given time, you can potentially create a lot of unhappy experiences for the rest of the people who are unable to access the same advertised database.

I work at a university library and have found that the vendors of databases are often able to temporarily waive access restrictions when a librarian wants to teach a class and demonstrate their product. It has been a while since I've worked in a public library so I don't know whether these same vendors would be willing to similarly waive access restrictions for the length of time of a marketing campaign. I would hope so because we can hardly blame the public for using Wikipedia when they don't even know that they have other choices.

A standing army is waiting for orders

When authors wax poetic on the wonders of Wikipedia, they often gush about the ability for just anyone to alter any of its pages within. But to me, that's not the wonder of Wikipedia. What makes Wikipedia so wonderful is not that you, the reader, can easily add a big, fat whopping lie to one of its encyclopedic entries but the fact that more likely than not, your big fat whopping lie will be made to quickly evaporate by one of its many nameless volunteer editors. So when there is a ripple of applause in the blogosphere because someone in libraryland created a wiki, I am frequently unimpressed. Technology is easy. Creating a community that actively contributes and edits content (and comedy) is hard.

Now don't get me wrong. I love Wikipedia. I love the fact that it is not-for-profit and ad-free. I love that it strives for a universal (and multilingual!) access to information for self-education. And while Wikipedia may not do the best job in capturing all facets of all disciplines (like history), it unto itself, captures a history of the present moment where you can see the ideas of the day negotiated in public. I think all librarians would be testifying their love to Wikipedia if it wasn't for that tricky matter of authorship. And so our massive free-standing army of fact-checkers and citation chasers stands idly by.

Imagine if you will if there was a project like Wikipedia that *did* activate just even a fraction of the world's librarians to take up the cause and actively contribute on a regular basis. I do. I dream of a digitization project (untainted by corporate interests) that librarians happily tag away at, in their spare moments. I imagine government document librarians, going above and beyond mere data liberation and moving to liberation of a broader sort.

We have a community of librarians. We can rebuild. We have the technology.